Knights of Cydonia FC finally got over the line in the last game of the season with an easy victory over Aye Ready in what turned out to be BuchyC's last game in charge, not that he was around to coach his team as the rudderless strong squad were hapless to stand up against a rampant Knights side who won 4-0 to deny San Lorenzo any hope of catching them, meaning San Lorenzo would go into the play-offs. Two goals from Severino Motta and another each from Matts Lagergren and Barry Gifford ensured Knights would run out easy winners with Bagdasar Nazarian bagging a hattrick of assists.
It was a bit too late to challenge Mustelainen for the goal scoring award but because Gabriel Hrean was benched against San Lorenzo it meant that Matts Lagergren won the MVP award. This provided a nice substantial financial boost. For Severino Motta though, lifting another trophy and collecting more division winners' medals was a good sign that the team were on the right track.
The change report comes around and its mostly good, all the players who were below 30 finished on between 16 to 18 DV so a good chunk of players either didn't budge or went up 1 skill bar depending on their age. Matts Lagergren is now a 28/18 which is really good and he is joined in defence by a couple of 28/16s in Draganescu and Elen who are now both high in their skill band. The only real disappointment was Bert Sallqvist not going up, this was a bit of a disappointment.
So Knights are only one promotion away from the top flight. Unfortunately... Division 1b is looking like it's going to be uber tough. We are coming face to face with two teams who have climbed the divisions at the same time as us, Subbuteo Stars and Rockerbocker. These two teams are also same aged sides powering up the divisions and unfortunately both of them are stronger than us, especially Rockerbocker. We also have a terrible record against Rockerbocker so that doesn't bode well.
But then you also have to factor Mudchute Packers who got relegated. They had a manager change to Lplate, another manager we struggled to beat, and the league campaign is looking like Season 41 all over again! There's only one promotion place and one play-off place and there's just too many teams who could consider themselves true contenders for that place.
As if THAT wasn't enough the strongest goalkeeper in the division, a 20 bar goalkeeper, isn't on any of those teams and the other teams we will have to play have some fantastic players themselves. It looks like it's going to be a battle to stay in the division next season, we need to make sure we are extracting the maximum possible result from every game and we ideally also need to get results against our same aged superteam rivals, just because there are four superteams in the division now doesn't mean the other teams are bad by any means.
We have to travel to the place where the last team's hopes effectively ended in House of Stark, we have the team who we only beat on penalties in a cup final in Real Peeps to face. The other two are going to be brand new opponents to us, My-Tee Athletic (though we have played their manager in private leagues) and Beverley Town who are a complete unknown to us.
Wait, how does the manager know what division we're going to be in? Well, the divisions are decided by location. The location formula sorts all locations into a particular sequence with each country having it's own order, so Unknown is first followed by Sweden and then etc. There's only one Romanian manager in Division 1 next season (very unusual) but three other managers came up via Division 2d even if one did so with a previous side.
That leaves 5 UK based managers in Division 1 and the UK is placed after Sweden and a few select countries like Australia, Finland, France and Serbia but before the likes of Norway, Portugal, the US, the UAE, Thailand and Romania. However, one of those UK managers can't fit into Division 1b because there's only four other spaces, so the split down the middle of the list will occur between there.
We think it will be Partizan Belgretna who are the UK team who get separated from the rest, those being Beverley Town, My-Tee Athletic, ourselves and Real Peeps in that order but we may well be wrong. Seperating teams by location is a finicky process when that factor is something that can changed. After all, we're definitely sure SirReg isn't actually from the United Arab Emirates unless he's hiding something. Would certainly give us an explanation for their successes ! ;)
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